Strange looking ‘trees’ are popping up all around the world.
Towering above native pines, these scraggily ‘trees’ do not depend on sunlight
to survive and tend to prosper in dense human population areas.

Who has failed to notice the proliferation of these man-made
‘trees’, or cellular transmission towers, spreading across our cities? In the US alone, there
are well over 100,000 cell towers and thousands more are being added each
year.While some may debate the aesthetic nature of these towers,
there is little doubt that in the last decade we have become cellular addicts…as
dependent on them as we are to electricity in our homes.

We use these cell towers to virtually connect with the world, making them vital
to our 21st century every day life. How do they work? Whether you
are making a simple phone call or downloading the latest score in the Giant’s
game, these towers operate more or less the same:

Your cellphone radios to the nearest tower’s antenna that connects you to the cellular network in your area. Your call, along with many others, gets routed to a backhaul, usually an underground
wired T1 or T3 line.If there is no
ground connection your call goes back up the mast to a powerful line-of-sight
wireless microwave antenna. An incoming call similarly comes back from the
backhaul and up through the switch to the antenna, where it then hits your
phone wirelessly. If you are moving out
of your towers range, then there's a handoff to a different tower that
transmits a response back to you…and all of this happens in the blink of an
eye.

At the base of each tower you will find the tower’s brains
in a small fortified bunker to house the gear required for each station. This
equipment needs to run 7X24 with zero downtime… for obvious reasons. Since a 100% reliable source of energy does
not exist, batteries and generators are typically deployed as backup. And there
are safety regulations for example: The FAA requires constant red blinking lights
on each tower to identify it to low flying aircraft. This equipment also generates a great deal of
heat in these tiny enclosed spaces. Since many cell towers are remote, fuel
theft and security can be a problem as well.

While communities have gone to great lengths to blend the
towers into landscapes, there remains an opportunity to better manage these bases
and reduce their energy footprint.Considering the sheer number of towers, even the smallest improvement
can have a significant multiplicative affect.

Enter the IBM Intelligent Site Operations solution which was announced this year. The focus is on instrumenting the
management of a mobile network’s passive infrastructure and integrating it with
active network management.This solution
improves operations and reduces operating and energy costs, while improving
asset performance and management.

The solution architecture allows the carrier to
manage their passive assets (those not directly involved in delivering
communications service such as HVAC systems, generators, batteries, security
etc.)This includes monitoring,
maintaining and controlling these assets.For example temperature can be monitored inside and outside the
facility, and the thermostat can be changed remotely and you can take advantage
of free air cooling.Another feature is
that antennas can be remotely controlled to optimize coverage.

This solution also contains analytics that can
compare the most efficient sites to the least efficient sites in order to focus
energy improvement projects.By using
the same technologies to manage both active and passive systems we can increase
the effectiveness of the CSP in managing their overall operation and the
service that is being delivered.

We have completed Business Value Analysis (BVA)
at select Telecoms to quantify value, and ROI. The consensus is that this
solution can pay for itself while at the same time improving reliability. We
are working with partners such as Kentrox and Andrews as well as Johnson Controls.Not limited to North America,
we are also actively working with countries such as South
Africa, Egypt,
Brazil, Mexico, Eastern Europe and Europe.

Benefits include:

Reduced Fuel Costs

Enhanced Site Security

Reduction in Truck Rolls

Reduction in Site Maintenance Visits

Reduced Dispatched Technician Costs

The bottom line is this solution can help improve operations and energy
use in near-real time; optimize operations that put towers, assets and people
where they are needed most; plan better, from budgeting to preventive
maintenance, and support security and regulatory compliance with reliable data.
Lower cost, greener tower!

This morning I walked along a stone wall circling a hill as
far as I could see.To my right was an
expanse of green fields, bordered by forests that framed the horizon.The path I took this morning was well traveled. It was, in fact, along an aisle of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Many famous scientists,
dignitaries, and world leaders have walked these halls of local field stone and uninterrupted
glass.

Architected by Eero Saarinen over a half century ago, this
iconic structure is still the vibrant epicenter of the world’s largest
industrial research organization. Throughout the last five decades, this
building has facilitated famous achievements and longstanding worldwide patent
leadership. Saarinen believed that some
of our best thinking is done with nature as our inspiration. His design embraces the forested landscape and
natural stone with bold and sweeping lines that infer the endless possibilities
of the human mind. I settled into one of his womb chairs in the library looking
across a floating stone table into the green pasture to capture my thoughts for
this article on paper.

The TJ Watson Research Center is located in Yorktown
Heights, New York.It has played a lead pioneering
role in the evolution of IBM, but, like its location, maintains some distance
from the day-to-day operational units. Its shepherding, however, is felt around
the world with extended research facilities that have embraced the growing
global nature of our business.

The building and much of its furnishing, including the chair
I am sitting on, have remained relatively intact for the last five decades,
which is significant given the transformation of the IBM corporation since this
building’s capstone was put in place on April 25th, 1961.

That transformation has affected everything within and
without the structure itself while the foundational beliefs of IBM, like the
very foundation of this building, remain intact.

The building houses a vast collection of tools and
laboratories for close to six hundred PhD’s who work here. A formidable supply
of electrical power as well as over 15,000 different chemicals and toxic gases
are available.There is also an on-site nitrogen-generation
plant, a helium-delivery system, an oxygen system, and a wastewater-treatment plant.

How does a building, designed before the IBM 360 system, keep
up with the demands of bleeding edge science?I took a trip into the almost Harry Potter-like world of this building to
find out.

Between the numbered corridors and hidden behind almost-invisible
locked doors, another surprise awaited – the utility cores that efficiently
provide water and gases to the building’s many laboratories. This core is a
long and narrow alley with all manner of conduits and supply feeds. Who could
possibly work in such a space? Apparently there is a wizard called ‘the
plumber’ who has been tinkering in these spaces for longer than anyone in the
building can remember.

Behind the back of the building, I went through an accordion-style
access gate and down a set of steel steps into multiple large rooms that were filled
with massive equipment. The vibrations,
temperature, and sounds of these rooms let you know you are in the heart of the
building.

It’s hard to appreciate boilers, chillers, condensers, fuel
tanks, and electric stations until you stand next to (or under) them.Back in the days of punched cards and
magnetic core memory, the chillers in this building were powered by steam and
massive amounts of air exhaust were drawn out of the building by belt fans. The
speed of the fans was adjusted by using different belts, each of which was
changed by hand. Waste was pulled from the building from large skips on a daily
basis.

Today the science and tools, which IBM is using for smarter planet
offerings, are also transforming buildings like this that we live and work in. Manual controls and gauges have largely been
replaced with digital switches and smart sensors. Energy management, sustainability,
grey water applications, and carbon foot printing have supplanted prior
practices that were based on the idea of unlimited resource. Recycling at this
site has reduced waste to the point that only one container for two weeks is
all that’s needed.

It takes good architectural “bones” to accommodate such
change with only minor surgery. Today boilers are run far more efficiently and
chiller towers are able to operate 3000 hours a year on free-air cooling.Research staff are working to further increase
the efficiency of free-air usage by using the BlueGene supercomputer for
weather prediction, while solar experiments are conducted on the building
grounds. Facility engineers have developed and acquired software to run every
aspect of the building inside control rooms that resemble computer-driven
command centers.

IBM’s new smarterbuilding
solution leverages the experience gained from managing buildings like this
one.Coupled with the IBM software
stack, building management business partners, and global services, IBM is well
poised to continue this advance for the next 100 years. Operations, space, and
energy management are combining into one holistic, highly automated system. Building
data feeds are being aggregated, filtered, and correlated to produce work
orders and actions based on policies and rules that are programmed into the
system.Data from the buildings is being
captured in databases for analytics and mash-ups for different role-based
dashboards.

Smarter buildings will be holistically
managed and optimized to integrate well with other buildings, and withsmarter systems like smart grid and smart water.They leverage technology and processes to
create a safer, more productive, operationally efficient building that is also environmentally
responsible for the planet.

The very science and research that the TJ Watson Research
Center was designed to inspire and faithfully deliver over the last 50 years is
now being leveraged to make this building smarter.In turn, the smarter this building becomes,
the better job it will do facilitating the pioneering work which is conducted that
has been a hallmark of the IBM Corporation.